this gentleman, Kyrio Yorghi. He is come to tell us that His Beatitude the Patriarch Constantine Emmanuel is dead, and that you have been chosen to take his place.”
“Dead?” uttered the old man, looking about uncertainly. “I Dead?”
“No, father,” replied Anastass, solemnly kissing the hand he held. “It is you who are now Patriarch of Constantinople and Primate of Greece.”
Upon which he rose and made a sign to Yorehi. The latter knelt in turn before the old man, kissed his unwilling hand, and said:
“Your Beatitude, give me the blessing of God.”
The old man blinked again in the candlelight.
“I—I think—I will go to bed,” he stammered.
At this Yorghi rose hastily and turned away. Anastass, however, immediately spoke:
“That is right, your Beatitude. You must rest while you can, for weary days await us.”
VI
There was truth in what Anastass had said. He announced that they would have now to move into town, and a change came upon the house on the hill. The long rooms, bare as they were, were quickly made barer still; the halls were made impassable by boxes; the very garden was despoiled. The old man saw his little world dismantled under his eyes—its peace shattered by the fury of hammers and porters, its comfort buried in the depths of packing-cases. But the days were not many before Anastass decreed that it was time to go.
If the old man was bewildered by the fatiguing strangeness of these events, he still found it possible to smile—albeit somewhat wanly. And when the last moment came, the sharpness of it was turned by the novelty of what happened. For he was dressed in a long black robe with flowing sleeves, upon his head was set the Brimless cylinder of the Greek Church, about his neck was hung a chain of gold, and over his shrunken finger was slipped a great ring. Then a sedan chair was brought, and four sturdy porters carried him lightly away. He made a wonderful figure as they went down the break-neck cobblestones to the water—the stately old man in his black and white and gold. And perhaps a certain childish consciousness of it, an excitement of new impressions, made it easier for him to leave the garden and the arbor. At all events it was a great thing to get into the two-oared sandal that waited at the bottom of the hill, to be at last a part of the busy play which he had watched so long from afar. The presence of a stranger in the boat, whom Anastass called Dimitri, awed him a little at first. But he soon forgot everything in the pleasure of slipping down the Bosphorus on mid-current, with the gardened hills on each side running by like pictures in a dream.
The dream came to an end at Top-Haneh, where they swung inshore. There two victorias were waiting on the quay, and a brilliant red-and-gold cavass came ceremoniously forward to help them from the boat. Perhaps it was because he recognized the visitant of some nights before that the old man made less of having his hand kissed. But he was accustomed now to marvels, so that when he was put alone in the first carriage, with Yorghi on the box, he merely wore his patient smile as of old. Then the little cortège climbed the long hill to the Taxime, clattered down the Grande Rue de Péra, and drew up splendidly at the door of an establishment not far from Galata Serai.
The old man and the door-boy had each a moment for admiration. The old man had never seen anything so magnificent as the emblazonments—to him perfectly unintelligible—that covered the great windows: “Karaghieuze Frères, Orfèvrerie et Joaillerie, Fournisseurs de S.M.I. le Sultan.” As for the door-boy, he was accustomed to equipages as smart, and he had a particular salaam for certain diaphanous bundles of beauty that came in behind the Palace eunuchs: but he now decided that here was a new occasion for that salaam. So when the cavass held the carriage door and Anastass offered the old man his arm, the boy threw open his domain with an unction never to be surpassed. And perhaps his respect was only deepened by Yorghi’s cold refusal, after Dimitri had humbly followed the others, to entertain any relation whatsoever.
It must not be supposed that the Kara-